“To be perfect, there is no need to do singular things,” she would often repeat, after St. Francis de Sales; “what is needed is to do common things singularly well!” She carried the same zeal from convent to convent, from Port-Royal des Champs to Port-Royal de Paris; from Maubuisson, whither her superiors sent her to establish a reformation, to St. Sacrement, to establish union between the two orders; ever devoted to religion, without having chosen her vocation; attracting around her all that were hers; her mother, a wife at twelve years of age, and astonished to find herself obeying after having commanded her twenty children for fifty years; five of her sisters; nieces and cousins; and in “the Desert,” beside Port-Royal des Champs, her brothers, her nephews, her friends, steeped like herself in penitence.  Before her, St. Bernard had “dispeopled the world " of those whom he loved, by an error common to zealous souls and exclusive spirits, solely occupied with thoughts of salvation.  Even in solitude Mother Angelica had not found rest.  “I am not fit to live on earth,” she would say; “I know not why I am still there; I can no longer bear either myself or others; there is none that seeketh after God.”  She was piously unjust towards her age, and still more towards her friends; it was the honorable distinction of M. de St. Cyran and his disciples that they did seek after God and holiness, at every cost and every risk.

Mother Angelica was nearing the repose of eternity, the only repose admitted by her brother M. Arnauld, when the storm of persecution burst upon the monastery.  The Augustinus of Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres, a friend of M. de St. Cyran’s, had just been condemned at Rome.  Five propositions concerning grace were pronounced heretical.  “The pope has a right to condemn them,” said the Jansenists, “if they are to be found in the Augustinus, but, in fact, they are not to be found there.”  The dispute waxed hot; M. Arnauld threw himself into it passionately.  He, in his turn, was condemned by the Sorbonne.  “This is the very day,” he wrote to his sister, Mother Angelica, “when I am to be wiped out from the number of the doctors; I hope of God’s goodness that He will not on that account wipe me out from the number of His servants.  That is the only title I desire to preserve.”  M. Arnauld’s friends pressed him to protest against his condemnation.  “Would you let yourself be crushed like a child?” they said.  He wrote in the theologian’s vein, lengthily and bitterly; his friends listened in silence.  Arnauld understood them.  “I see quite well that you do not consider this document a good one for its purpose,” said he, “and I think you are right; but you who are young,” and he turned towards Pascal, who had a short time since retired to Port-Royal, “you ought to do something.”  This was the origin of the Lettres Provinciales.  For the first time Pascal wrote, something other than a treatise on physics.